CHAPTER VI.
WHEN THEY WOKE UP.
It was just about the time that Nick Carter discovered the loss of the diamond-incrusted watch and fob which were known collectively as the Seal of Gijon, when Patsy awoke from a sound sleep in Mala’s hotel and groaned:
“Gee! How my head aches! And my mouth tastes like the New York subway smells.”
He looked across to where Chick was stirring in his narrow bed, and tried to remember where he was.
“Chick!”
“Huh?” responded Chick.
“Why don’t you get up?”
“What time is it?” came the drowsy response.
Patsy did not answer. He was gradually getting his thoughts together, and he determined that this was not like Chick’s ordinary demeanor in the morning, no matter how late he might have retired the night before.
“Chick!”
“All right!”
It was not Chick’s real voice that responded, but a muffled echo of his usual incisive tones.
“What’s biting him?” muttered Patsy. “Is he going nutty?”
Patsy Garvan hoisted himself out of bed, and when his head had ceased swimming—at least to some extent—he walked over to Chick and gave his shoulder a rude yank.
Chick sat up, rubbing his eyes and pressing his two hands to the back of his head alternately.
“Sick?” asked Patsy.
“I feel pretty raw this morning,” replied Chick, shaking himself.
“Raw?” echoed Patsy. “I feel as if it would take a week’s cooking to make me fit for the table.”
“What’s it all about?” mumbled Chick.
“Something has slipped a cog and put a kink in our differential,” answered Patsy. “We are not in New York, old man. This is the country of the Caribbean Sea, and all the goodness has been drained out of it by the Panama Canal. Get up!”
“All right!”
Chick rolled out and stretched his arms, while Patsy softly opened the door of Nick Carter’s room.
“Hello! The chief is up!” exclaimed Patsy. “Wonder he didn’t call us.”
He opened the door into the hall—only to meet Phillips, who had his hand up to knock. He looked heavy and disgruntled, like the other two.
Before Patsy could speak, the valet pushed him gently back into the room and shut the door.
“We should not have drunk that coffee,” began Phillips. “Let me see how the prince is.”
He looked into Nick Carter’s bedroom and started as he saw that he was not there. Then he slipped over to the bed and examined it carefully about half a minute.
With a low exclamation he picked up from the bed-clothing a small meerschaum cigarette holder and took it over to the window to look at it closer.
“What have you got there?” asked Chick.
Phillips put the article into Chick’s hand and shrugged his shoulders. Chick passed the holder to Patsy.
“Whose is it?” asked Patsy. “It’s an old-timer, all right.”
“Jason!”
Phillips dropped this name from his lips as if it explained everything that needed to be known. Then he turned to the bed. It showed plainly that it had been slept in, but it was tumbled in such a manner as to suggest that its occupant had got up in a hurry.
Chick also gazed at the bed, while the habit of deduction, which had been emphasized in him by the admonitions of Nick Carter, caused him to note every little detail, no matter how unimportant it might appear to be at first glance.
“How many pillows were there on this bed last night, Phillips?” he asked abruptly.
“Two.”
“Sure?”
“Quite sure, doctor,” replied Phillips, who never forgot that Chick was supposed to be a Doctor Fordham on this trip.
“One of them is missing.”
Phillips looked about the room, under the bed, behind the shabby dresser, and in out-of-the-way corners. Then he gazed steadily at Chick and nodded his head as if he had come to an indubitable conclusion.
“Jason must have taken it,” he said. “He has been near us for a day. Prince Marcos caught him last night, opposite the hotel, but Jason got away. I will go and see about the motor car. Will you have breakfast first?”
“Breakfast nothing!” snapped Patsy. “I wouldn’t dare to take anything here again.”
“I have made some coffee that I know is right,” was Phillips’ quiet announcement. “I was sick, and I went downstairs to get some water from the well. Then I felt better, and, as there was no one else in the kitchen, I made some coffee on the fire and brought it up in a pitcher. See.”
He led the two detectives into his own room, and showed them a pitcher of hot coffee, with two of the heavy white-stone mugs used in that region, some thick slices of rye bread, a goodly sized cube of butter, and a table knife.
Patsy chuckled as he put his face above the pitcher of coffee and allowed the grateful aroma to steam up into his nose.
“You’re a dandy, Phil!” he exclaimed. “There’s even a paper of sugar and cream in the coffee. Here’s ‘how,’ fellows!”
It was an axiom with Patsy Garvan that a good thing should be grabbed quickly wherever it was found. So he poured out half a mug of the coffee, stirred in some sugar with the handle of the knife, and threw it down his throat with a jerk.
“Have some, Chick?”
Patsy acted as host to his comrade, while Phillips gazed at them with stony complacency and waited for them to say something about their missing chief.
It must not be supposed that either Chick or Patsy had for a moment lost sight of the fact that the disappearance of Nick Carter proved that the enemies of Prince Marcos were close on their trail.
They drank their coffee and disposed of some of the bread and butter, because they knew they could not do effective work unless they kept up their strength.
But their discussion of the case went on between mouthfuls, and with such effect that they were ready to start in pursuit of the men who had spirited away their leader even before they had finished breakfast.
“Phillips says our motor car is still in the shed, where it was put last night,” observed Chick.
“I heard him,” answered Patsy, from the depths of his coffee mug. “He says it is dirtier than when we came in.”
“Been used in the night.”
“We must have had dust on it when we got here,” suggested Patsy. “The road we covered wasn’t any polished hard-wood floor, Chick. Don’t forget that, old man!”
“I know. We had dust on everything when we rolled into the yard below. Only it happens that Phillips wiped it all off with cloths, a wet sponge, and chamois polisher,” returned Chick.
“Yes,” put in Phillips respectfully. “I knew the car would not run well if it were not cleaned. Besides, we expect to run into Penza to-day.”
“You mean, we did expect to do it,” remarked Patsy significantly.
“We shall do so,” said Chick, with a reproachful glance at his friend. “Unless you don’t feel inclined to go after the chief and bring him back in spite of anything and anybody.”
Patsy’s face worked convulsively and his eyes blazed. For a moment he was inclined to let fly at his fellow worker, much as he liked him.
He controlled himself, but the tones in which, the next instant, he addressed Chick, were as sharp and cold as zero-made icicles.
“If anybody in the world except you or the chief had handed that to me, Chick,” he said, “I’d have had to tear into him if I knew I was going to be licked to a standstill in the first round.”
“I beg your pardon, Patsy!” interrupted Chick. “I didn’t mean——”
“To think that you, Chickering Carter, would ever say that to me,” went on Patsy, his voice trembling. “Have I ever held back? Don’t you think I care as much about the chief as anybody? Why, I’d buck a charge of the Light Brigade for him, and chew up a thirteen-inch gun afterward, just to prove that I was with him first, last, and all the time. Gee! Chick! You’ve hurt me where I live! I’m sore, and I can’t help it.”
It did not take Chick more than thirty seconds to placate Patsy, but that was only because there was no time to be wasted in sentimentality. If there had been plenty of leisure, Patsy would have had to be coaxed and apologized to for half an hour.
That anybody should intimate, ever so indirectly, that he was not loyal to Nick Carter to the backbone, was something Patsy could not stand. When he said he was “sore,” he told only the truth. His feelings were rasped worse than they had been for many a long day.
So taken up had Patsy been with the injustice of Chick’s remarks that he had almost lost sight of the work before him. He was brought to himself by the sudden reappearance in the room of Phillips.
“The motor car is ready, sir,” announced Phillips, in the same well-modulated tone in which he would have said “Dinner is served, sir.”
They went downstairs, without seeing anybody about the place. Mala was not visible, and he had no assistants except his wife, who was hidden in the scullery most of the time.
Chick spent about ten minutes in the dusty roadway before he climbed into the car.
“Which way are we going, Chick?” asked Patsy, as he took his place by the side of his comrade, who was in the driver’s seat.
“The marks of our wheels show that the car came down the side road leading over the mountains,” ventured Phillips.
“I know that,” returned Chick. “I have been looking things over. We have a patch on one of our hind tires, and it shows quite plainly in the dust. Jump in.”
When Phillips had taken his seat in the back of the machine, Chick turned into the side road—which ran up a rather steep hill—and opened the throttle wider.
“I see old Mala peeping out of a lower window at the corner of a blind,” observed Patsy. “The old rip thinks we don’t get on to him. Gee! I’d like to make over his ugly face!”
“Jason is by his side,” put in Phillips, with his usual coolness.
“I’ll attend to Jason the next time I meet him,” called out Chick, over his shoulder. “Where will this road take us, Phillips?”
“Anywhere,” was the rather unsatisfying answer. “It depends on how far you go.”